IT Salaries: How Much You'll Earn State By State

Advertised vacancies for IT pros have fallen over the last nine months, but there are still opportunities in some sectors. Here's where the biggest demand is state-by-state across Australia, and what you'll be paid for key roles.

Peoplebank's latest ICT Salary & Employment Index includes a chart tracking the number of advertised vacancies since May last year. Taking those May numbers as a baseline of 100, most categories have experienced a decline:

While that means there are fewer jobs in most categories, vacancies are still being advertised. According to Peoplebank, these are the areas with the most demand at the moment in each state (the survey doesn't cover Tasmania or the Northern Territory):

[block]

NSW

Front-end web developers

Mobile developers

Business analysts

Security consultants

Project managers

Network engineers

Victoria

Business analysts

Project managers

Enterprise architects

Security consultants

Cloud engineers

Technical writers

[block]

Western Australia

Project managers

Business analysts

Infrastructure engineers

Solutions architects

Helpdesk staff

Desktop engineers

ACT

Testers

Java programmers

.NET programmers

Web specialists

Business analysts

Project managers

[block]

Queensland

Business analysts

BI experts

Data warehousing

South Australia

Business analysts

Service desk

Developers

In the table below, we've listed the median salaries for selected roles advertised during the last quarter from the report. These are base salaries without commission, superannuation or other benefits.

Worst case scenario you end up with a fairly practical skill set, some qualifications that look pretty good on a CV regardless of the type of work you're applying for and a nice fall back career to take advantage of while you find something else to do.
As much as they make it feel like these are super important decisions that will dictate how the rest of your life plays out they aren't. As serious as the decisions are don't stress about screwing them up. If by the time you finish studying your skills are about as useful as a degree in bee keeping you just pick yourself up, find some temporary work, find a new direction and study some more.

Surely you are joking? I know 3rd and 4th year (out of uni) Engineers on 160k (they are the exception mind you). I don't know a single engineer not earning 6 figures. The graduates who are doing work placement are pro-rata 65k a year. You are being taken advantage of if you aren't making 80k+ 2 years after you leave uni.

Meanwhile I hope this article serves as a warning for people to avoid IT at all costs and go somewhere else as the money is pitiful unless you contract in the high end of town. Also IT Uni degrees aren't worth the paper they are printed on. They are 5-10 years behind the technical curve and those are the up to date curriculums. Get some field specific certifications they will do you far more good than spending 3 years and 30-40k+ on a Uni degree.

I would recommend that anyone in support type roles should consider skilling up in other areas. You are also going to be increasingly competing with offshore services as remote support becomes more commoditised. As a developer, I see that there are limits to outsourcing of my type of work (and I do work with overseas outsourced developers) but support work is generally application of more generic technical skills.

I used to quite enjoy the customer satisfaction of support and actually helping people, unfortunately it became a case of cheapest bid wins, with too many customers per support person, long queues, bad quality assurance, and no authority to actually solve problems before fobbing them off in another queue instead of spending another 5 minutes to get a happy customer. I couldn't even cope with being a manager of miserable people with pretty much no chance of job satisfaction anymore and am re-skilling to change careers entirely.

It would be more accurate to say Sydney, Victoria, Brisbane instead of NSW, VIC and QLD as those are the only places with IT jobs. Govt has most of their jobs down in Canberra, Banks in Sydney or Melbourne. So how accurate is this table?

Plus an Accountant needs CPA/CFA qualifications to work at this level, Engineers need to have qualifications, however Welcome to IT - you can get whatever you want without formal qualifications. The recruiters know didly squat about what they write, most of them are backpackers on a working holiday. For every one vacancy, several recruiters advertise the same position multiple times over, and some person (journo/economist) interprets that as abundance of jobs... how warped and silly. This data also forms the basis of many reports at Uni's, Govt offices, etc you can imagine how it ends, you are seeing the results, anyways.

Helpdesk is 1st level, usually phone support. If they can't fix it over the phone or via remote control, they'll escalate it to desktop support, or 2nd level. Desktop are generally more experienced will be the ones who walk over to see you and fix it, if it's needed.

Its not just wages dropping but revenue as well for the IT game. So many people I know are struggling because of lower expenditure. This is obviously a flow on affect to wages as well.
The people who will win out in a few years will be the TRADE sectors. Sparkies, brick layers etc as no one is doing those jobs. Everyone things IT is where the money is (still) but not the fact anymore.

I have worked in I.T for 18 years now. My salary has dropped over the past 10 years even though the new positions I obtain are considered higher than the previous ones. The main thing I have noticed is the big companies have pretty much stopped employing locally for positions that pay more than $75k and outsource those positions to other countries instead. Currently I'm doing a position I did 15 years ago, I'm getting $5k less than I was for the same position 15 years ago. For what I spent on getting an Electrical Engineering qualification I would have been better off getting into medicine.